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Despite Game-Related Glitches, AMD Discontinues Monthly Driver Updates
MojoKid writes "Recently AMD announced that it would cease offering monthly graphics driver updates, and instead issue Catalyst versions only 'when it makes sense.' That statement would be a good deal more comforting if it didn't 'make sense' to upgrade AMD's drivers nearly every single month. From 2010 through 2011, AMD released a new Catalyst driver every month like clockwork. Starting last summer, however, AMD began having trouble with high-profile game releases that performed badly or had visual artifacts. Rage was one high-profile example, but there have been launch-day issues with a number of other titles, including Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, Bat Man: Arkham City, and Battlefield 3. The company responded to these problems by quickly releasing out-of-band driver updates. In addition, AMD's recent Catalyst 12.6 beta driver also fixes random BSODs on the desktop, poor Crossfire scaling in Skyrim and random hangs in Crysis 2 in DX9. In other words, AMD is still working to resolve important problems in games that launched more than six months ago. It's hard to put a positive spin on slower driver releases given just how often those releases are necessary."
It depends on where the problem lies: If the game is using the directX (or openGL) libraries correctly but the driver is mucking things up, then the game developer should not need to code around driver bugs. Conversely, if the game developer is using a 'clever hack' to eke out some more performance, this creates a headache for the driver developers to keep this hack working in one instance but stop it working for things written to the word of the API in other instances.
How about forcing the game makers to TEST THEIR DAMN GAME
Games often expose driver bugs. Major game developers are in communication with GPU vendors and when they discover bugs, the ones which turn out to be in the driver or the microcode sometimes get fixed, depending on how new the product is and whether the GPU is from Intel, AMD, or nVidia. nVidia has by far the best record in terms of working drivers, and also in terms of improving support for old hardware in new driver revisions. AMD is by far the worst. They have abandoned whole platforms while they were still shipping, for example R690M. I'm using a subnotebook based on it right now. Only thing it will run without shitting itself is Vista. And fglrx didn't support it when it was brand new, and still doesn't support it, and never will.
Don't be so quick (or anonymous, or cowardly) to assume that it's the game developer's fault when a problem "with the game" is fixed with a driver update.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
nVidia has the mother of all driver bugs and they've refused to fix it for years. If you run a DVI to HDMI cable from an nVidia card with no native HDMI support, the driver recognizes the HDMI cable anyway, assumes it can run sound, and attempts to run sound via the nonexistent sound chip on the video card. In essence, it overrides the onboard sound and sometimes even a discrete sound card in the computer. Since native HDMI support was introduced in newer cards, nVidia has felt no need to address this glitch in their older cards. I ended up recycling an otherwise perfectly good GeForce 9800 GT because the computer it was in was hooked up to the 40" television, but any time I had the video card driver installed I had no sound!
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Direct3D technically allows for both, the XNA game dev framework specifies number of pixels however, for performance reasons. The number of samples method tends to be more accurate but very slow. It's the same thing on the OpenGL side. CAD, 3D applications such as Maya etc, compositing programs etc tend to use samples over pixels, for more accuracy.